Sir Peter Medawar: (On “The Phenomenon of Man”): Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.
Albert Einstein: We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Richard Dawkins: Science has no methods for deciding what is ethical. That is a matter for individuals and for societies. But science can clarify the questions being asked, and can clear up obfuscating misunderstandings. This usually amounts to the useful: “you cannot have it both ways” style of arguing.
Granny Weatherwax (auth: Terry Pratchett): Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn’t mean they’re true.
Albert Einstein: Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Carl Sagan: You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe.
Charles Darwin: Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
Jonathan Swift: It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
Richard Feynman: But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves — of having utter scientific integrity — is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman: It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
Stephen Jay Gould: The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.
